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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Proposal: A Museum for the Victims of Jihad

Museums play a key role in defining societies and establishing
priorities. Dorothy's ruby slippers and the Wright Brothers' plane at the Smithsonian, the Museum of Natural History's life-size blue whale,
the Uffizi Gallery's David, Amsterdam's Anne Frank House, the Israeli Shrine of
the Book's Dead Sea Scrolls: all exemplify the essential work museums perform.

There was a time when people weren't sure how
to name or recount what has come to be called the Holocaust. The United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum does the hard work of curating a nightmarish
tale that must be told. Hitler asked, "Who speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?" In 2005, Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk mentioned
the Armenian Genocide in an interview. Turkey prosecuted Pamuk for
"insulting Turkishness" and he had to flee his homeland. Institutions
like the USHMM guard against such revisionism.

Museum exhibits receive the tender care a religious
society extends to objects of veneration. Artifacts might be sealed in nitrogen
chambers and handled only with gloved hands. Lights are lowered and visitors
speak in hushed tones; thus, artifacts are accorded all but eternal life. This
veneration highlights museums' duty to prioritize. For whom do we shed tears?
What detail must never be eliminated from the canonical history? Museums
influence and reflect policy, spending, and curricula.

Exactly because museums are so powerful, controversy
surrounds them. Conflict over the treatment of Native
Americans in museums has been fought in the courts.
The 9/11 Memorial Museum has been criticized for its admission fee, its architecture,
its inclusion of the Ground Zero Cross, and its treatment of Islam.

The twenty-first century needs a Museum of the Victims of
Jihad. Jihad is a major force in world history, affecting everything from
desertification to international trade routes, for example Christopher
Columbus' discovery of America.

Koran 9:5 and hadith of Bukhari 1:24 are
just two of the verses that stipulate that Muslims are to fight non-Muslims
until they become Muslim. Muslims, citing these texts, have been killing
non-Muslims for 1400 years. Motivations such as greed, bloodlust, jealousy, tribalism,
territorial expansion, revenge, hunger, and dynastic disputes have long sparked
war. There is, though, perhaps no other written texts that have for so long and
so unambiguously instigated murder. Soldiers in war killed for Nazism, for
example, for a mere six years.

It is difficult to find one coherent treatment of jihad
per se. As Bill
Warner has written,

"Islamic nations are nearly 100% Muslim. Those
countries were Christian, Buddhist and Hindu. Exactly how did this change happen?
When you read history it seems that Islam came, and, magically, the countries
are Islamic … The entire history of the rise of Islamic imperialism is denied
in the curriculum of our schools."

The textbook History
Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond teaches, "Muslims should fulfill
jihad … in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to
take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good
works and correct wrongs." Or there's this; jihad is "a struggle
within each individual to overcome difficulties and strive to please God."
"Islam spread peacefully," reports Pearson's My World History. In Prentice Hall's The Modern World, the 9-11 hijackers are merely "teams of
terrorists."

Distortion of Islam is not limited to grade school. New
York University's Slavoj
Zizek is a superstar scholar of Kim Kardashian wattage, though he is
significantly lesswellgroomed.
He insists
that 9-11 is equivalent to the "Christian" Oklahoma City Bombing. The
Koran is not inspiring anyone: "one should instead focus on today's global
capitalism" and "the catastrophic consequences of global economy."
ISIS is representational of "western corruption by products;" ISIS
members are businessmen selling cotton and oil. Westerners are "barbarians";
they practice "fundamentalist violence" through "anti-immigrant
populism." When Muslim gangs rape women, they perform "a
carnivalesque rebellion of the underdogs."

Politicians from both parties have distorted jihad.
"Islam is peace," George
Bush declared. "ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing
of innocents," said Barack
Obama. Hillary
Clinton opined that the four dead Americans in Benghazi might be the
victims of "guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some
Americans."

Elites have so often repeated that violence committed by
self-identified jihads has "nothing to do with Islam" that
"nothing to do with Islam" has become a punchline: see here,
here and here.

Contrast this with the PC insistence that any evil
committed by a Christian be treated as an expression of an essential, ineradicable
flaw in Christianity. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is frequently
cited as an example of "Christian terrorism." In fact he declared
himself an agnostic saying, "Science is my religion," and there are
no Christian verses telling Christians to kill, and neither Jesus nor his
apostles killed anyone. The attempts to identify Nazism as Christian are
extremely powerful, even though they defy every
known fact.

Another approach that distorts history: slice up the
jihad narrative into isolated episodes: "Turks against Byzantines,"
"Tolerant
Moors against Inquisitorial Spaniards" or in the words of Rolling Stone's cover story on Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev, "how a popular, promising student was failed by his family and
fell into radical Islam."

This slicing of history into unconnected capsules was exemplified
on May 5, 2016 when NPR host Brian Lehrer argued
that Al-Qaeda chose to attack America on 9-11 in order to tinker with the New
York City mayoral election. Mark Green, a prominent Democrat who was expected
to win that year but lost to a Republican, called 9-11 "a comet from the
sky." Lehrer's theory, which reduces 9-11 to a temporary and local event,
ignores that, as has frequently been pointed out, including by scholar Bernard
Lewis, September 11 is the date of the Battle of Vienna, where jihad stop
its thousand-year expansion. Lewis identified September 11 as a key date before
2001; he was not Monday-morning-quarterbacking.

Jihadis embrace and cultivate the very same continuity
and uniformity that the Politically Correct forbid the masses to recognize. Jihadis
have been claiming the same inspiration, in the same verses, the same heroes,
and the same history, for 1400 years.

Khalid ibn al-Walid, aka "The Drawn Sword of Allah,"
"The Master of War" and "The Friend of Death" was a
companion of Mohammed. He lived in the seventh century. Before invading Persia,
he bragged that jihadis love death more than non-Muslims love life. Today, 1400
years later, "We love death more than you love life" is a standard
jihadi taunt. Khalid is the star of Omar,
a multimillion-dollar, 2012 miniseries. In this YouTube clip, Deathboy, played
by handsome actor Mehyar
Khaddour, can be seen manfully menacing a crowd of kuffar, promising to
kill anyone who doesn't convert to Islam. In posts under the clip, twenty-first
century Muslims vow to be just like Khalid. Their choice of role model does not
bode well for world peace.

Not just jihad quotes and jihad heroes are stable
throughout the 1400 year-long narrative of jihad, but jihad practices as well. The
Koran recommends beheading (8:12).
In 627, in Medina, Mohammed supervised the beheading of hundreds of Jews. In
Spain, in 1086 at the Battle of Zallaqa, 24,000 Spanish corpses were beheaded. These
Spaniards were already dead; beheading them served no military purpose. Human
remains were mounded high. Muezzins climbed atop these "minarets" and
sang praises to Allah. In 1761, in the Battle of Panipat, jihadis decapitated
40,000 Hindus. In 2007, members of MILF, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front,
decapitated eleven Marines. The Arabian Peninsula, Spain, India, and the
Philippines are thousands of miles apart. The Arabian, Spanish, Indian, and
Filipino beheadings occurred centuries apart. The killers and their victims
spoke entirely different languages, were of different economic groups and ate
different foods. One salient inspiration unites these beheadings: jihad.

How many people have been lost to jihad? Bill Warner counts
270 million. Koenraad
Elst has suggested that eighty million Indians lost their lives to jihad. Their
numbers are controversial. No one else has come up with any better number,
though. To count the dead lost to jihad is to acknowledge that people have been
killed in the name of jihad and that acknowledgement would violate Politically
Correct taboos.

Linguist George Lakoff emphasizes the importance of how
the mind creates categories. As he points out, how we group items determines
how we decide such weighty matters as politics, spending, and human sympathy. Think
of how you might categorize the following people.

Kahina was a seventh-century
Berber warrior queen who lived in what is today Algeria.

Carlos, Jaime, and Maria Luisa
were Argentinians in downtown Buenos Aires on the morning of July 18, 1994.

Khaled al-Asaad was an 81
year-old Syrian archaeologist who had given his professional life to the
ancient site of Palmyra.

Veronicah Wairimu Kamau was the mother
of Simon, a four-year-old boy. She worked at the Nakumatt supermarket in
the Westgate Mall in Kenya.

Chen Guizhen's husband was
commuting by rail in Kunming, China, on March 1, 2014.

Shushanig der Marderosian was an
Armenian wife and mother who starved to death in Yerevan in 1919.

Three Chinese sisters were at
home in Jakarta, Indonesia, in May, 1998. Intruders raped the two younger
girls. They told the oldest, "You are too old and ugly for us."
The rapists burned the home and pushed the two younger sisters to their
fiery deaths. The oldest alone survived.

Laxmi Narayan Goel was a lawyer
from Hyderabad. Rebbetzin Rivka Holtzberg was from Israel. Both were both
in Mumbai, India on November 26, 2008.

Most of us would not place these disparate individuals,
who lived on different continents, during different epochs, in the same
category. In fact they were all victims of jihad and its epiphenomena. Grouping
them and other victims of jihad teaches us much about jihad's reach and
devastation.

Professional, credentialed scholars at the new museum
will, finally, arrive at the best approximation of the number of jihad's
casualties. As many victims as can be named will be named.

The president of the Museum of the Victims of Jihad will
be a proven administrator. The museum's curators will be published scholars
with advanced degrees. They will represent every nation that has been affected
by jihad. The museum's collections and publications will adhere to the most
rigorous scholarly demands. The museum will disseminate facts stated in
rational and careful language, free of exaggeration, provocation,
sensationalism, unnecessary gore, or hate.

The museum must be accessible worldwide. Such access is
guaranteed by placing the museum, not in any physical location, but exclusively
on the web. Many museums maintain a web presence,
and web-based museum access has been elevated to an art.

The museums' homepage will consist of a mural collage of portraits
of the above-listed individuals and others like them. The persons in the mural
will be vividly alive; their portraits will celebrate their unique and precious
humanity. Color and shape will be handled in such a way so that very different costumes,
activities and time periods flow together and complement each other. The mural
itself will be a living document. Artists will continue to contribute new
images. No human endeavor can record all the victims of jihad; God alone knows
all their names. The ongoing effort to extend this mural in an aesthetically
satisfying way, though, will represent the museum's mission.

Jihad bullies us. Jihad wants us to regard its victims
with revulsion. The word "holy" is related to the word
"whole." The entire point of beheading is to desecrate a corpse by robbing
a body of wholeness. Islam's amputation
fetish corrupts natural sympathy into disgust and terror. Beheading,
bombing, acid attacks,
and hacking
turn God's most glorious creation, a human body, into mere splatter, the stuff
of grand guignol.

The Museum of the Victims of Jihad will overturn jihad's corruption
of sympathy. Exhibits will bring to life the pre-Islamic world of North Africa,
the Middle East, and Central Asia, and inhabit those worlds with historically
verifiable men, women, and children, going about their daily lives. After 9-11,
the New York Times published "Portraits
of Grief," brief, exquisite salutes to the people who died on that
day. The museum will do similar work. Jihad's victims will live again in the memories,
the prayers, and the security policy of museumgoers.

It is important that even a casual visitor, who has only
a few minutes to spend at the museum, get an idea of how many lives have been
taken in the name of jihad. Two of the museum's features will do this work. One
will be a horizontal timeline that charts jihad deaths chronologically. Another
will be a video of a world map that depicts the spread of jihad geographically.

A visually pleasing, unobtrusive wallpaper for the
museum's pages will do the aesthetic work of linking stories that span space
and time. A gold floral motif in an infinity pattern on a warm brown background
will echo the museum's emphasis on life; the tendrils of the vegetative design
will literally and figuratively link one exhibit to the next in a living chain.

Icons on the homepage will allow the visitor to take a
self-guided tour of the museum. Artifacts in the museum's displays will be
catalogued chronologically, geographically, and by ethnic and religious group. One
will be able to take a thematic tour of the museum, as well, focusing, for
example, on military history, on the role of jihad in the international slave
trade, and on the impact of gender on jihad, including the castration and
murder of males and the sexual enslavement of females.

Visitors will be able to explore what the museum's
collections say about technology: the use, and the loss, of Greek fire, the
loss of the wheel in North Africa after the Muslim Conquest, drones and IEDs. Muslim
soldiers pioneered biological warfare at the 1346 Siege
of Caffa, catapulting plague-stricken corpses over the walls of the
besieged city. The visitor will learn of scholarly speculation on the linking
of jihad with desertification.

Another possible theme: children and jihad. A
one-year-old baby was strapped to a bomb in a 2007 attempt on the life of
Benazir Bhutto; the bomb killed 170 Pakistanis. Children served in the Iranian
Basij during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Another possible theme: slaves. Daniel
Pipes argues that slaves
played a unique role in Muslim armies.

Visitors will be able to visits exhibits in chronological
or geographic order. Those choosing the chronologic option will be shown a
timeline. Visitors choosing to explore the collections geographically would be
shown a door. The door might be from the World Trade Center. It might be from a
Serbian peasant home. It might be the typical door of a seventh-century Berber
dwelling. The visitor moves the cursor to "knock" on the door. The
visitor is ushered into a hallway.

This virtual hallway, depending on how the visitor has
mapped his tour, might contain dioramas that depict North African life 1400
years ago, or Visigoth churches, or Vienna in the seventeenth-century. These
dioramas will bring these lost worlds to life through artifacts. There will be
eating utensils, clothing, and depictions of festivals.

There will also be sound. The visitor will hear the same
hymns that Greek Christians sang in Hagia Sophia before that church was turned
into a mosque; the same recitations that sanctified life in Persia, before
Zoroastrian blood flowed so freely it ran mills; the chanting of Krishna
devotees in Keshav Dev Temple, before its destruction by Aurangzeb, great
Muslim destroyer of Hindu temples; readers murmuring aloud the texts in the libraries
of Ctesiphon and Alexandria before Omar burned books to heat his soldiers'
baths and threw books into the Euphrates; the ceremonies performed before the
Bamiyan Buddhas, before the Taliban dynamited them. The visitor will hear the
waves lapping the shore when visiting the diorama depicting the Italian coast
in the sixteenth century, where Muslim slave-traders took so many Italians as
slaves that it was "raining Christians in Algiers" and one could
"swap a Christian for an onion."

There are ample eyewitness accounts, written both by
jihadis and their victims, of what jihad looks like. These accounts will be
used to create dioramas.

Edessa was a Christian city in what is now Turkey. It was
home to the Image of
Edessa, linked by Ian Wilson with the Shroud of Turin.
Jihadis arrived in 1144 and 1146. Michael the Syrian wrote a contemporary
account. Andrew Bostom cites that account in The Legacy of Jihad.

"Thirty thousand souls were killed. Women, youths,
and children to the number of sixteen thousand were carried into slavery,
stripped of their clothes, barefoot, their hands bound, forced to run beside
their captors on horses. Those who could not endure were pierced by lances or
arrows, or abandoned to wild animals and birds of prey. Priests were killed out
of hand or captured; few escaped. The Archbishop of the Armenians was sold at
Aleppo … The whole city was given over to looting, 'for a whole year,' resulting
in 'complete ruin.' From this disaster the Christian community of Edessa never
recovered."

Exhibits will be cross-indexed. For example, a visitor might
search the museum holdings for famous quotes. That visitor would be shown the
exhibit outlining the Arab conquest of the Persian Empire and would see the
above-mentioned necrophiliac quote by Khalid: "You should convert to
Islam, and then you will be safe … I have come to you with an army of men that
love death as you love life." That exhibit would be indexed under keywords
including Khalid ibn al-Walid, companions of Mohammed, Persia, the seventh
century, etc.

The quote-seeking visitor would also be shown the exhibit
on the Muslim Conquest of the Byzantine Empire, source of this from the fifteenth-century
Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that
was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his
command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." After Pope Benedict
XVI merely repeated this quote in his 2006 Regensburg University lecture, Palestinians
firebombed churches, Somalis shot an Italian nun in the back, and Iraqis beheaded
a priest and stabbed Christians to death.

That same quote-seeking visitor would be shown the 1683
Battle of Vienna exhibit, and learn this rhyme from Jan Sobieski: "Witajcie
w piekle, zblakane owieczki." "Welcome to Hell, lost lambs" –
reportedly what Sobieski said to the Turkish invaders he defeated.

The visitor would encounter the exhibit covering the Barbary
Wars. On March 28, 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams summarized
what they had learned about jihad from the Ambassador of Tripoli. Jihad "was
founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that
all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that
it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found,
and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every
Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."

The visitor would discover this ISIS quote from a
September, 2014 YouTube recruitment video, "We will conquer your Rome,
break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah."

And of course the visitor would be shown the exhibit for
United Airlines Flight 93 and discover Todd Beamer's words, "Let's
roll."

Faith leaders from the Buddhist, Catholic, Coptic, Greek
Orthodox, Hindu, Jewish, Pagan, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Secularist, and other belief
systems will provide the museum with chapels where persons wishing to offer
prayers or carry out appropriate rituals for the deceased can do so. Yes,
Muslims may also pray here.

The Museum of the Victims of Jihad will not hate anyone,
including Muslims, who have themselves been victims of jihad. Among those
commemorated in the museum will be 1,500 Shiite air force cadets. On June 12,
2014, in Tikrit, Iraq, ISIS members bound these cadets' hands behind their
backs, and dumped them, face down, in ditches. They then shot the defenseless
cadets in the back. The goal of the museum is to honor human life. That goal
embraces Muslims as part of humanity. The museum will offer Muslims the chance
to confront, reconsider, and reject jihad.

Jihadis and their many allies and apologists will of
course protest. Why not a museum describing the horrors of Western colonialism
and Christianity? Those failings are detailed in numerous books, feature films,
museums, and school curricula. Western scholars and Christians themselves have
produced this burgeoning avalanche of self-examination and self-flagellation. Muslims
deserve the same opportunity that Westerners have had to confront the dark side
of their own history, and to improve themselves, their lives, their futures, their
impact on their fellow humans, and on planet Earth.

Another objection: how to define death-by-jihad? Will the
museum insist that every time a Muslim kills someone, that that is an
expression of jihad?

Answer: look to the motivation of and statements by the
killers themselves. For example, in May, 1998, Muslims rioted against Chinese
in Jakarta, Indonesia. There were mass rapes. Some scholars insist that there
was no
religious motivation for the riots, and the only motivation was economic. Similarly,
Slavoj
Zizek, exhibiting just how quickly Marxists
are to betray women, explained away the 2016 New Year's Eve sex assaults in
Cologne, Germany, as an economically-motivated "obscene version of
Carnival."

On the other hand, on June 10, 1998, the New York Times reported that Jakarta rapists
said to their victims, "You must be raped because you are non-Muslim."
Some accounts of the riot report that rapists shouted "Allahu Akbar."
A Cologne
imam said Muslim-on-German sex assaults "were the girls' own fault,
because they were half naked and wearing perfume." Islamic scripture,
history,
and practice
sanction Muslim men raping non-Muslim women the men have overpowered; as quoted
above, that very tradition is an ISIS recruiting tool. Given this context, a
purely economic explanation for mass rape in Jakarta or Cologne is suspect.

Finally, a disclaimer: I am not a website designer, a
wealthy philanthropist, or a museum professional. I cannot make the Museum of
the Victims of Jihad a reality. I describe, here, only what should and could be.